The papers were arranged and listed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Each volume relates to a particular country/subject.

Referencing: In 2012, as part of transferring digitised records to The National Archives' new Discovery catalogue, the items throughout this series were temporarily numbered, starting at 1 in piece 1A and ending at 13830 in the last piece. In November 2013 these were corrected to have their item references constructed of the piece number followed by the first folio number of the item.